Creative pedagogies to survive the “mercurial path” of educational change: flexible curricula, diversity of learning and identities under transformation

Abstract

Stories of creativity enable an understanding of the rhetoric that are incorporated into present-day school education. They also make it possible to situate the dominant vision of creativity associated with innovation, technology and creative industries. In this paper, I deal with the main determining factors, strategies and results that appear to be recurrent in the reports, projects and research which have examined creative classrooms for over a decade in the 21st century in the Anglo-Saxon context. Likewise, considering the trends of contemporary pedagogies, there are approaches that constitute creative modes of resisting the “mercurial path” of educational change in financialized capitalism (Hargreaves, 2010, 2011). For this reason, I explore the experimental sense of pedagogy of the event, the curriculum as a rhizome and the classroom as a heterotopia, as examples of creative pedagogies of survival. If we focus on discourses of creativity, on creative pedagogies and on education for creativity, we can highlight the challenges of change in policies, organizations and teachers’ identities in Catalonia, which are necessary to promote creative learning in schools.

Keywords: Creative pedagogies, educational change, curriculum, creative learning, identities.